Lewis Howes is a New York Times best-selling author, 2x All-American athlete, keynote speaker, and entrepreneur. The School of Greatness shares inspiring interviews from the most successful people on the planet—world-renowned leaders in business, entertainment, sports, science, health, mental health and literature—to inspire YOU to unlock your inner greatness and live your best life.
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The #1 illness of our time has nothing to do with your body. Dr. Lisa Miller, Columbia University researcher and author of The Spiritual Child, has spent over a decade scanning human brains to understand how we're built for God's presence. What those MRIs reveal is both startling and deeply hopeful. You were not built for scarcity or isolation. Three specific circuits in every human brain light up when you connect to something greater than yourself, a bonding network, an attention network, and a...
The real mistake isn't spending too much. It's dying with money you never used. Bill Perkins built a career generating over $2.2 billion in trading profits as a hedge fund manager. His book Die With Zero reframes what money is actually for. Money is a tool, not a goal. Every dollar you hold at death represents life energy you spent earning it and never converted into something real. The question isn't how much you save. It's whether you're using your wealth, your health, and your time together, ...
You can earn half a million dollars a year and still have nothing left by the end of the month. That's not a theory. A Goldman Sachs study found 40% of people making over $500,000 are living paycheck to paycheck. The income isn't the problem. The identity is. George Kamel, #1 national bestselling author of Breaking Free from Broke and co-host of The Ramsey Show, has taken thousands of calls from people who earned great money and lost it all. People who confused looking rich with building wealth....
Your brain is making choices for you before you even realize it. Neuroscientist Emily McDonald, known as Emonthebrain, studies how your identity, nervous system, and subconscious programming quietly run the show. Most people think they're choosing. Research shows the neural pattern of a decision lights up in a brain scan before you're consciously aware you've made it. That's the gap Emily spent years learning to close. She grew up with clinical depression, ADHD, anxiety, and a victim mindset bak...
Not everyone is going to like you. And that is okay. Emmanuel Acho built one of the most meteoric rises in media in recent memory. Former NFL linebacker. Fox Sports host of Speak for Yourself. Author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including Illogical: Saying Yes to a Life Without Limits, published under the Oprah imprint. He has done things no one outside of Oprah herself has done. And still, the criticism came. This conversation is about what you do with that. How do you hold you...
You can be wildly successful and still be quietly falling apart inside. Joel Kinnaman has appeared in some of the most talked-about shows in Hollywood. He has starred in The Killing, Robocop, House of Cards, Altered Carbon, and is currently in his fifth season of For All Mankind. And he will be the first to tell you that none of that made the war inside his head any quieter. Before every live theater performance for three straight years, he threw up. He kept a bucket backstage. The negative voic...
Investigative journalist David Epstein reveals how having too many options often leads to paralysis, advocating for the strategic use of constraints to foster creativity and drive success. He introduces the BCS Press Release framework for batching work, clarifying commitments, and making decisions, drawing lessons from both business failures like General Magic and personal adversities. The conversation highlights the importance of deliberate focus, forgiveness, and strong relationships for achieving true greatness and happiness.
Most people learn how to love the hard way. What if you didn't have to? Faith Jenkins is a TV judge who has presided over more divorce cases than most people will ever witness in a lifetime. She has also been through roughly 10 serious relationships of her own, waited until 42 to marry, and did both pre-engagement and premarital counseling before saying yes. She knows this terrain from every angle. What she learned will shift the way you think about every relationship you are in or hoping to fin...
Clinical psychologist and "Sleep Doctor" Dr. Michael Breus reveals how understanding your unique chronotype and addressing the psychological and biological factors of sleep can dramatically improve your rest without medication. He shares a five-step daily framework, debunks popular sleep myths like the 8-hour rule and mouth taping, and provides practical tools like 4-7-8 breathing and the Napa Latte protocol to optimize sleep quality and overall performance. This episode emphasizes adapting sleep science to your real life for profound long-term health and achieving greatness.
Your effort isn't the problem. Your programming is. Lewis Howes spent years outworking everyone around him, and it still wasn't enough. He had the discipline, the results, even the New York Times bestseller. But inside he still felt like that broke kid on the couch who wasn't enough. That gap between outer success and inner peace is where this episode begins. Most people are running a mental operating system they never chose. The beliefs you hold about money, love, and what you deserve weren't d...
Every diet you've ever tried has failed you for one reason: it never told you when to eat. Your body runs on two energy systems. One burns sugar. The other burns fat. Most people never spend a single day in the second one. Around eight to ten hours without food, the switch flips. Ketones flood your brain. Hunger quiets. Mental clarity hits. Healing turns on. This is what fasting expert Dr. Mindy Pelz has been teaching for over 25 years, and what her book Fast Like a Girl made impossible to ignor...
Your money beliefs were locked in by the time you were seven years old. The patterns showing up in your bank account right now started somewhere in your childhood. And most of the financial advice you have been given is aimed at the wrong target. Financial educator Haley Sacks, a.k.a. Mrs. Dow Jones, author of Future Rich Person: The New Rules for Building Wealth, breaks down why obsessing over lattes and pre-chopped vegetables is a waste of your financial energy. Negotiating your salary, unders...
Most people don't realize they have a ceiling on their success. Not a skill ceiling. A preference ceiling. Brendon Burchard calls it the complexity ceiling, and it's the invisible line where your comfort wins over your vision. The highest performers in the world share one non-negotiable: their preferences never outrank their aspirational self. They don't wait to feel ready. They generate the feeling they need and act from that place. Brendon introduces his FREE framework (Feeling, Responsibility...
Graham Stephan was relentless about one thing before he had anything else: not spending money he did not have to spend. He calculated the gas cost of visiting a friend and decided it was not worth it. Most people would call that extreme. He calls it the foundation. The habits he built early, consistency, focus, and ruthless saving, did not feel heroic in the moment. They felt boring. But boring done every single day is what compounded into real estate commissions, YouTube income, and an investme...
Anita Moorjani did everything right. She ate organic, avoided sugar, studied cancer prevention obsessively. She still got lymphoma. That contradiction is the entire point. Growing up as an Indian woman in Hong Kong, caught between British culture and a community that valued sons over daughters, Anita learned one thing above all else: make yourself small and keep everyone happy. That lesson followed her for 40 years, through a canceled arranged marriage, a cancer diagnosis, and a four-year deteri...
Kevin Love has an NBA championship ring, five All-Star selections, and an Olympic gold medal. He also had a panic attack that changed everything. In this conversation, he gets radically honest about what it means to carry anxiety, rage, and childhood wounds into a life that looks like success from the outside. He talks about nine years of estrangement from his parents, the reconciliation that came just before his father died, and what becoming a father himself has taught him about what it means ...
Dr. Edith Eger was 16 years old when she danced for Josef Mengele at Auschwitz the same night her mother was sent to the gas chamber. She survived. And then she spent decades running from what happened until she finally turned around and walked straight back into it. What she found there changed everything. Edith teaches that freedom is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose. Again and again. By becoming your own good parent, facing what you have been carrying, and giving ...
Chloe Kim won her first Olympic gold at 17, became the most dominant athlete in her sport, and then quietly started questioning whether any of it made her feel the way she expected it to. She reveals that the greatest pressure she ever felt came not from the crowd or the competition but from internalizing the belief that first place was simply where she was supposed to be, making every win feel expected and every loss feel like failure. That belief quietly ate at her for over a decade, and unpac...
Ryan Leak shares powerful strategies for proactive living, radical generosity, and setting boundaries to navigate difficult people. He emphasizes finding peace in decision-making and understanding the difference between genuine giving and enabling. Leak also explores the importance of authenticity, letting go of the need to prove oneself, and aligning with a higher purpose to serve others and achieve true greatness.
In this inspiring episode, Pastor Michael Todd reveals how an unaddressed childhood wound fueled his drive for greatness, impacting his relationships and personal well-being. He explains why many struggle to find love due to presenting defended versions of themselves, not healing past traumas, and lacking self-love. Michael shares his journey of overcoming emotional eating and redefining success, highlighting that true fulfillment comes from aligning purpose with partnerships and consistently working on spiritual, physical, and emotional health.
Amy Purdy walked into an operating room at 19 about to lose both legs, and instead of collapsing into fear, she gave herself three goals before the anesthesia took hold. You know that feeling when life pulls the ground out from under you and every identity you had disappears overnight? Amy has lived that more than once, and what she discovered is that the challenges you most want to escape are actually moving you closer to your purpose, not away from it. The key is learning to lean into problems...
Dr Joe Dispenza drops a finding that most people are not ready for: a seven-day meditation retreat produces measurably greater healing than most pharmaceutical drugs, with 80% of participants expressing the same healing genes by the end. If you have ever tried to think positive and felt nothing shift, Dr Joe explains why that happens and what your body is actually doing instead. Most of us are unknowingly running 95% of our lives from subconscious programs rooted in the past, and our bodies quit...
Michael Pollan cuts through nutrition confusion and exposes the uncomfortable truth: ultra processed foods now make up more than 60% of the American diet, and they're engineered to manipulate your body and brain. Most foods you think are healthy, like plant-based burgers with 21 synthetic ingredients and diet sodas that trick your metabolism, are actually sabotaging your health and creating cravings that trap you in a cycle of poor eating. Your gut microbiome holds the key to everything from you...
WARNING: This episode includes sensitive discussions that may be distressing for some listeners. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available anytime by calling or texting the number 988. Most people see Dan Martell's highlight reel: the private jet, the millions, the AI mastery. But they don't know about the angry, ashamed teenager who felt worthless and unlovable, who attempted suicide and spent time in jail. In this episode, Lewis goes deep into Dan's journey from rock botto...
Emma Grede's most surprising confession is that she never saw her childhood in East London as a disadvantage. While raising her younger sisters, skipping school, and watching Oprah to find her blueprint for life, she was quietly building the belief that she was more capable than anyone around her. That unshakable self-trust is the thread running through everything she has built, from Good American to SKIMS to the Obama Foundation board. For anyone who has ever let fear, self-doubt, or the weight...
Dr. Andrew Weil drops a counterintuitive truth right out of the gate: avoiding head trauma and quitting smoking are the two most powerful things you can do to prevent cognitive decline, yet almost no one talks about them in the brain health conversation. Most of us are chasing the latest supplement or biohack while ignoring the chronic stress quietly flooding our brains with cortisol and damaging the very region responsible for memory and emotion. Dr. Weil connects the dots between what you eat,...
Dean Graziosi, New York Times bestselling author and business partner of Tony Robbins, reveals the one thing he believes most people get backwards: confidence does not come first, courage does, and until you get in the game, you will never feel ready. So many people are paralyzed right now by the speed of change, whether that is AI, the economy, or shifting opportunity, and Dean lays out exactly why that paralysis is costing them more than any risk ever would. He breaks down how to find what tru...
Myron Golden drops a revelation early in this conversation that stops you in your tracks: if you are broke, you are not spiritually bankrupt, you are spiritually deceived. Most people carry a hidden belief that money is evil and that having it requires doing something wrong, a lie so deeply embedded that it quietly sabotages every financial decision they make. Myron connects that deception to universal struggles around worthiness, fear of success, and the painful tension between faith and financ...
Shi Heng Yi has spent nearly four decades studying and teaching the Shaolin philosophy of self-mastery, and his core insight may be the most honest thing you hear all year: the reason you are not where you want to be is not bad luck, bad timing, or lack of talent. It is one of five ancient hindrances operating in your mind right now, without your awareness. So many people feel the pull of desire for things that do not serve them, carry ill will they cannot explain, move through the day in a fog ...
Dr. K, the Harvard-trained psychiatrist known for his work with gamers and high performers, drops a truth that reframes everything: your negative identity isn't a flaw — it's your mind's attempt to protect you from failure. Most people go through life trying to upgrade from a loser identity to a winner identity, never realizing that both are traps that warp how you see reality. If you've ever wondered why motivation disappears the moment a goal feels out of reach, or why doing everything right s...
